The service provider market moves up the value chain from pure connectivity services to high added value services able to generate revenue. In addition to the development of their customer base, service providers are now looking to increase their average revenue per user. More compelling services such as notification services promise high profit margins and greater customer satisfaction.
A notification service is a means for a service provider to inform users when an event occurs. Initially, two main methods, broadcast and group, were used.
Using the broadcast method, the service provider broadcasts the information to all of its subscribers. The method is mainly used for advertising. Generally, the content is provided by the service provider itself and not by a third party.
Using the group method, based on a demographic or another criteria, the subscriber is classified in a predefined group, and receives the event notifications aimed at the group he belongs to. For instance, when an event occurs, a human operator can send a message to members of a particular group.
Each method has its own limitations. The process is completely manual. The classification of users in groups is very coarse-grained. The user cannot personalize the notified events according to his topics of interest.
Another limitation is that an end-user cannot choose his preferred delivery channel. In most cases, the end-user has no real choice on both the content and the delivery channel.
A new technology called Intelligent Notification Services (INS), intended to solve the above limitations, has recently emerged. INS allows users to specify their preferences and to automatically notify them when an event within a predefined topic of interest occurs. This process includes steps of defining the user's content and delivery-channel preferences during the subscription process, defining rules based on the user's preferences, receiving new content provided by a content provider, and using notification engine to find the content corresponding to the user's preferences in the new available content.
Within this approach, the end-user has the ability to choose the content for which he wants to be notified and the delivery channel.
This is the first step for personalizing the notification process. An example of such service is the following: “Send me a Short Message Service (SMS) when my preferred stock hits $100.”
This approach, nevertheless, has some drawbacks. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) presented to the user for his subscription is different for each content type and has to be redesigned for each new content type.
During the subscription process, the user has to enter explicitly the topics for which he wants to be notified. For example, if he wants to be notified each time the word “Barcelona” appears, at some point of the process, he will have to enter the word “Barcelona”. This is a serious drawback because this declaration process is very error-prone to spelling mistakes, misinterpretation and the like, and can be very tedious especially when using mobile devices.
Selection rules need to be different based on the content type. Rules related to a news service are different from rules related to a mail service. This difference has a serious impact for the service provider. As for the GUI, the rules must be redefined for each content type. Even for the same content type, the rules may be different depending on the delivery channel. For example, news can be delivered using different standardized formats such as Rich Site Summary (RSS) and Open Content Syndication (OCS).
Before entering the content in a notification engine, the content must be adapted to establish a correspondence between the content and rules which have been defined. For example, if the rule is based on a keyword, the content received from the content provider must be adapted to contain this keyword. This adaptation must be done for each content type.
The above drawbacks have a major impact for the service provider in terms of integration of new services and development costs.